


Post

by SQ (proteinscollide)



Category: Pop Music RPF
Genre: F/M, break-up, celebrity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-10-30
Updated: 2003-10-30
Packaged: 2017-10-15 03:12:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/156442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/proteinscollide/pseuds/SQ
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A relationship and its value.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Post

You aren’t the smartest cookie, but you know your business well enough. You hold out for an obscene amount of money for Justin’s hands to be on you once more. One photo shoot, a day out of your busy separate lives, and you let your instincts take over despite the jitters you have beforehand. The clicking of the camera guides you, a practised experience, and the photographer almost comes going over the proofs.

There’s a series of black and white high gloss shots, diffused light through a knot of tree branches and foliage, that show you reaching to Justin, bringing him closer for a lingering kiss. The last photo makes the cover - your lips seconds from touching, eyes closed sweetly to each other.

Your people tell you the deal is a success. The magazine is happy, the issue flies off the shelves; the entertainment media pick it up and show the pictures everywhere; and the popular opinion that makes it back to your staff hired to track this kind of buzz is positive. People finally believe in your romance and heartache.

You’re not sure it makes up for the fact that it hurts your eyes to see it, the light behind your inclined heads, glints in your hair. But you’ve always trusted others know what is and isn’t right for you, so you smile politely in response, and wish to yourself many different things that never happened.

*

You don’t speak to him anytime before the shoot. A flurry of emails and faxes leave your assistants shaking their heads, but the magazine is excited enough to act as an intermediary, smoothing things over. You don’t make any demands, but you know people working on your behalf are; when you finally ask what the hold-up is, afraid it’s some ridiculous request that you’ve supposedly made, you’re surprised to hear the problem is at Justin’s end. He wants to choose the location, and your publicist has been pushing for a neutral decision. You’re tired of waiting for the day, dreading and dreaming. You tell her to let it go, let him get his way. She wrinkles her brow at you for a moment, or tries but the Botox is obviously in effect, and you push the issue aside with confused small talk.

The morning of the shoot, too early despite the large coffee you gulp down in the car on the way over, you step unsteadily out of the car and gasp, winded, when you realise where Justin has brought you for this final rehash of your relationship. Felicia gives you a sharp glance, her eyes already apprehensive. So you make fists at your side, breathe deep, pretend everything is alright. It isn’t. The location is just another high rise with a stylish modern garden, courtyard style on the roof, lush and cold at the same time. But you’ve been here before.

Justin greets you at the arbour entrance with a wild grin, teeth bared. You tip your head to one side with a blank pretty smile, faltering, and behind him the photographer is already set up, loving it. _Snap, snap, snap._ It’s the complete ambush you should have expected, Justin and his little games, after all this time. You hold your resentment in the shapely hollow of your stomach, remember that you’re coming to this as the contrite party. You’re a professional too, you know how to play. You smile more brilliantly for the camera then, blooming in front of the lens.

All morning stretching into the afternoon, your deliberate moments together are captured, a delicate guarded act of tensions and faded lust. You don’t address Justin directly, and he remains near silent. Uncharacteristically, there’s no sound system, a frightening stillness, no music as both of you prefer; Felicia scurries up to ask if you want that remedied, despite it turning out to be one of Justin’s conditions. You worry about further delay, also that you don’t remember a time when you didn’t move choreographed unconsciously by the beat around you.

Justin solves the dilemma for you. He holds you around your waist, large hands braced against the curves, and positions you in minute movements. You let your instincts take over then, follow his lead and the murmuring encouragement of the cameraman. Justin urges you to climb a ladder propped up by an elm tree, fingers looped around your wrist. You try to hold steady, wobbling on the rough wooden rungs, as Justin slides one hand up the inside of your thigh. He turns you over, supporting your weight as you rest your hands on his shoulders, and presses his face to your belly; you shiver under the mint green folds of your sundress. He lifts his head, a wicked grin fading as his expression scans from besotted, angry, tender, and back again, cycling as the film records his emotions. You hold the back of his head in your clasped hands, gazing down, and only the two of you know it’s all an act by now, a reminder for you for his amusement.

In every shot you are leaning away from him, except for those famous last few, as the sun sets and you relent, you regret, but for the camera not for him.

*

You’ve been here before. There’s a suite on the fifteenth floor, immediately below this verdant roof. Justin would call you, months after the humiliating interviews and press conferences to announce private things, and you would drop everything - your friends, your current paramour - to meet him there. He came to you smelling of another girl’s perfume, and you hated everything about the situation except that he made you feel alive.

One afternoon, his clothes abandoned on the untouched bed with its opulent covers, he fucked you against the chest of drawers opposite, your hands helpless against the foreign cut of his hair. He hated you too, hated in the way he hiked up your skirt, pushed his hands under the lace edge of your panties. Between thrusts he sing-songed at you, that familiar breathlessness, that he’d just shot the video for his next single. You knew you should care, a warning bell in your head, but you rolled your hips upwards instead, slammed back with ferocity of feeling.

“I’m not interested,” _in that in you_ , you said, bored even to your ears, and you folded your palm over the warm skin of the back of his neck, drawing him closer. He slid his face down the bone of your chest, a slurred kiss over skin, and looked up at you with a smirk.

“You will be,” he promised, as you drifted in concentration, struggled towards the heavy feeling below your waist. You were beyond paying attention to his bitter little games, you only noted then the surety in his voice. You laughed instead as the bliss washed over you, the sweetest confidence in the way your sweaty bodies still fitted tightly against each other.

*

Maybe you moved too fast in your relationship, at the very end. Sitting on his bed on the bus, ready to fly out the next day, you look up between the chords he’s strumming over and over on his guitar and say you maybe-sorta-nothing-personal think there is nothing left for the two of you, that your lives don’t fit as they used to.

Justin’s head jerks up from watching the careful position of his fingers on the fretboard, a chilled shock settling over his face. You look him in the eye because you feel you owe him that, smile gently at him with what you think to be compassion.

You don’t recognise then what your respective expressions would turn out to be worth, post-breakup.

END


End file.
